Introduction

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise and fall of modernist architectural dogma, espousing what many regarded as coldhearted rational rules for problem solving through form generation. Few members of the public appreciated the resulting break from the past. In the effort to find an alternative to modern architecture, the architectural academy imported European structuralist philosophy and recast it as architectural theory. The profession and the academy was receptive, as they had been alerted by the publication of Robert Venturi’s “gentle manifesto on non-straightforward architecture,” Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), along with other grumblings about the poverty of modernism from Peter Blake and others.